Arundhati Roy Quotes

I think the BJP is a joke. It is a party of semi-literates and has fascist tendencies. Such a party can never have real roots in India because Hinduism is the antithesis of fascism.

In a government such as ours we have vigorous contests to determine who should lead. The recent election was no exception. Now we inaugurate a new government on a day that transcends any one individual or any one party.

Today in India there are all sections of people, as the BJP realized when the poor voted them out.

... elections are no longer representative.

It appears that there have been differences of opinion and party differences, from the first establishment of government to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our own country; that these will continue through all future time; that every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution

The purpose is to give me a choice between two positions. If one party includes both positions, you have eliminated my right to choose .... In your determination to win everyone's vote, you could destroy the purpose of voting at all.

In time the Democratic party will fade away and we will have a capitalistic party and a socialistic party.

The red and the blue. There are only two political parties in America. No other country has such a situation…. It’s an anomaly in the world. So is having elections on a Tuesday; nobody shows up.

It's not that I'm afraid to be tagged with the label of right-wing or even centre-right; I just don't believe it properly describes either the choice that we face politically or what I'm trying to say.

There are many politicians who are from the Congress or the BJP or the Aam Aadmi Party who are all my friends and who are all young politicians between the ages of 27 and 35.

We are affectionate BJP and not fascist as termed by the opposition.

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

As much as I cherish your [McCarthy's] right to a platform as an independent candidate I am not going to sit here quietly and listen to you denigrate the two party system. It has served our country well over the last two hundred years.

Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.

the two major parties too often present us with a choice of the evil of two lessers.

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.

In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.

Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

The BJP is an optimistic party. Our strength and our democratic values are such that even a poor person from a backward section - like me - has been nominated as a Prime Ministerial candidate.

I am not responsible for creating an opposition, neither am I responsible for appointing my own successor. My job is to allow for the opposition to exist within what the realms of the law. There is space in Rwanda for political parties - if fact we have about a dozen of them - as long as their objective is not to take us back twenty two years. On that point, we are and will always be very vigilant.

If Robert Heinlein is more to your taste than George Lucas: “If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against.” That’s certainly true of me. Over my lifetime, the Republican Party has done far more to repulse me than the Democratic Party has done to appeal to me. But the result in the voting booth would be about the same either way.

Vote for the candidate you believe would be the best candidate. That's the way it should work.

Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.